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IETF RFC 8739
Last modified on Wednesday, March 11th, 2020
 Permanent link to RFC 8739
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Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Y. Sheffer
Request for Comments: 8739 Intuit
Category: Standards Track D. Lopez
ISSN: 2070-1721 O. Gonzalez de Dios
A. Pastor Perales
Telefonica I+D
T. Fossati
ARM
March 2020
Support for Short-Term, Automatically Renewed (STAR) Certificates in the
Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME)
 Abstract
Public key certificates need to be revoked when they are compromised,
that is, when the associated private key is exposed to an
unauthorized entity. However, the revocation process is often
unreliable. An alternative to revocation is issuing a sequence of
certificates, each with a short validity period, and terminating the
sequence upon compromise. This memo proposes an Automated
Certificate Management Environment (ACME) extension to enable the
issuance of Short-Term, Automatically Renewed (STAR) X.509
certificates.
Status of This Memo
This is an Internet Standards Track document.
This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force
(IETF). It represents the consensus of the IETF community. It has
received public review and has been approved for publication by the
Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). Further information on
Internet Standards is available in Section 2 of RFC 7841.
Information about the current status of this document, any errata,
and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at
https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/RFC 8739.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2020 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
(https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
publication of this document. Please review these documents
carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must
include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
described in the Simplified BSD License.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
1.1. Name Delegation Use Case
1.2. Terminology
1.3. Conventions Used in This Document
2. Protocol Flow
2.1. Bootstrap
2.2. Auto Renewal
2.3. Termination
3. Protocol Details
3.1. ACME Extensions
3.1.1. Extending the Order Resource
3.1.2. Canceling an Auto-renewal Order
3.2. Capability Discovery
3.3. Fetching the Certificates
3.4. Negotiating an Unauthenticated GET
3.5. Computing notBefore and notAfter of STAR Certificates
3.5.1. Example
4. Operational Considerations
4.1. The Meaning of "Short Term" and the Impact of Skewed Clocks
4.2. Impact on Certificate Transparency (CT) Logs
4.3. HTTP Caching and Dependability
5. IANA Considerations
5.1. New Registries
5.2. New Error Types
5.3. New Fields in Order Objects
5.4. Fields in the "auto-renewal" Object within an Order Object
5.5. New Fields in the "meta" Object within a Directory Object
5.6. Fields in the "auto-renewal" Object within a Directory
Metadata Object
5.7. Cert-Not-Before and Cert-Not-After HTTP Headers
6. Security Considerations
6.1. No Revocation
6.2. Denial-of-Service Considerations
6.3. Privacy Considerations
7. References
7.1. Normative References
7.2. Informative References
Acknowledgments
Authors' Addresses
1. Introduction
The ACME protocol [RFC 8555] automates the process of issuing a
certificate to a named entity (an Identifier Owner or IdO).
Typically, but not always, the identifier is a domain name.
If the IdO wishes to obtain a string of short-term certificates
originating from the same private key (see [TOPALOVIC] about why
using short-lived certificates might be preferable to explicit
revocation), she must go through the whole ACME protocol each time a
new short-term certificate is needed, e.g., every 2-3 days. If done
this way, the process would involve frequent interactions between the
registration function of the ACME Certification Authority (CA) and
the identity provider infrastructure (e.g., DNS, web servers),
therefore making the issuance of short-term certificates exceedingly
dependent on the reliability of both.
This document presents an extension of the ACME protocol that
optimizes this process by making short-term certificates first-class
objects in the ACME ecosystem. Once the Order for a string of short-
term certificates is accepted, the CA is responsible for publishing
the next certificate at an agreed upon URL before the previous one
expires. The IdO can terminate the automatic renewal before the
negotiated deadline if needed, e.g., on key compromise.
For a more generic treatment of STAR certificates, readers are
referred to [SHORT-TERM-CERTS].
1.1. Name Delegation Use Case
The proposed mechanism can be used as a building block of an
efficient name-delegation protocol, for example, one that exists
between a Content Distribution Network (CDN) or a cloud provider and
its customers [STAR-DELEGATION]. At any time, the service customer
(i.e., the IdO) can terminate the delegation by simply instructing
the CA to stop the automatic renewal and letting the currently active
certificate expire shortly thereafter.
Note that in the name delegation use case, the delegated entity needs
to access the auto-renewed certificate without being in possession of
the ACME account key that was used for initiating the STAR issuance.
This leads to the optional use of unauthenticated GET in this
protocol (Section 3.4).
1.2. Terminology
IdO Identifier Owner, the owner of an identifier, e.g., a domain
name, a telephone number, etc.
STAR Short-Term, Automatically Renewed X.509 certificates.
1.3. Conventions Used in This Document
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and
"OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in
BCP 14 [RFC 2119] [RFC 8174] when, and only when, they appear in all
capitals, as shown here.
2. Protocol Flow
The following subsections describe the three main phases of the
protocol:
* Bootstrap: the IdO asks an ACME CA to create a short-term,
automatically renewed (STAR) certificate (Section 2.1);
* Auto-renewal: the ACME CA periodically reissues the short-term
certificate and posts it to the star-certificate URL
(Section 2.2);
* Termination: the IdO requests the ACME CA to discontinue the
automatic renewal of the certificate (Section 2.3).
2.1. Bootstrap
The IdO, in its role as an ACME client, requests the CA to issue a
STAR certificate, i.e., one that:
* Has a short validity, e.g., 24 to 72 hours. Note that the exact
definition of "short" depends on the use case;
* Is automatically renewed by the CA for a certain period of time;
* Is downloadable from a (highly available) location.
Other than that, the ACME protocol flows as usual between IdO and CA.
In particular, IdO is responsible for satisfying the requested ACME
challenges until the CA is willing to issue the requested
certificate. Per normal ACME processing, the IdO is given back an
Order resource associated with the STAR certificate to be used in
subsequent interaction with the CA (e.g., if the certificate needs to
be terminated.)
The bootstrap phase ends when the ACME CA updates the Order resource
to include the URL for the issued STAR certificate.
2.2. Auto Renewal
The CA issues the initial certificate after the authorization
completes successfully. It then automatically reissues the
certificate using the same Certificate Signing Request (CSR) (and
therefore the same identifier and public key) before the previous one
expires and publishes it to the URL that was returned to the IdO at
the end of the bootstrap phase. The certificate user, which could be
either the IdO itself or a delegated third party as described in
[STAR-DELEGATION], obtains the certificate (Section 3.3) and uses it.
The auto-renewal process (Figure 1) goes on until either:
* IdO explicitly terminates the automatic renewal (Section 2.3); or
* Automatic renewal expires.
Certificate ACME/STAR
User Server
| Retrieve cert | [...]
|---------------------->| |
| +------. /
| | | /
| | Automatic renewal :
| | | \
| |<-----' \
| Retrieve cert | |
|---------------------->| short validity period
| | |
| +------. /
| | | /
| | Automatic renewal :
| | | \
| |<-----' \
| Retrieve cert | |
|---------------------->| short validity period
| | |
| +------. /
| | | /
| | Automatic renewal :
| | | \
| |<-----' \
| | |
| [...] | [...]
Figure 1: Auto-renewal
2.3. Termination
The IdO may request early termination of the STAR certificate by
sending a cancellation request to the Order resource as described in
Section 3.1.2. After the CA receives and verifies the request, it
shall:
* Cancel the automatic renewal process for the STAR certificate;
* Change the certificate publication resource to return an error
indicating the termination of the issuance;
* Change the status of the Order to "canceled".
Note that it is not necessary to explicitly revoke the short-term
certificate.
Certificate ACME/STAR
User IdO Server
| | |
| | Cancel Order |
| +---------------------->|
| | +-------.
| | | |
| | | End auto-renewal
| | | Remove cert link
| | | etc.
| | | |
| | Done |<------'
| |<----------------------+
| | |
| |
| Retrieve cert |
+---------------------------------------------->|
| Error: autoRenewalCanceled |
|<----------------------------------------------+
| |
Figure 2: Termination
3. Protocol Details
This section describes the protocol details, namely the extensions to
the ACME protocol required to issue STAR certificates.
3.1. ACME Extensions
This protocol extends the ACME protocol to allow for automatically
renewed Orders.
3.1.1. Extending the Order Resource
The Order resource is extended with a new "auto-renewal" object that
MUST be present for STAR certificates. The "auto-renewal" object has
the following structure:
* start-date (optional, string): The earliest date of validity of
the first certificate issued, in [RFC 3339] format. When omitted,
the start date is as soon as authorization is complete.
* end-date (required, string): The latest date of validity of the
last certificate issued, in [RFC 3339] format.
* lifetime (required, integer): The maximum validity period of each
STAR certificate, an integer that denotes a number of seconds.
This is a nominal value that does not include any extra validity
time due to server or client adjustment (see below).
* lifetime-adjust (optional, integer): The amount of "left pad"
added to each STAR certificate, an integer that denotes a number
of seconds. The default is 0. If present, the value of the
notBefore field that would otherwise appear in the STAR
certificates is pre-dated by the specified number of seconds. See
Section 4.1 for why a client might want to use this control, and
Section 3.5 for how the effective certificate lifetime is
computed. The value reflected by the server, together with the
value of the lifetime attribute, can be used by the client as a
hint to configure its polling timer.
* allow-certificate-get (optional, boolean): See Section 3.4.
These attributes are included in a POST message when creating the
Order as part of the object encoded as "payload". They are returned
when the Order has been created. The ACME server MAY adjust them at
will according to its local policy (see also Section 3.2).
The optional notBefore and notAfter fields defined in Section 7.1.3
of [RFC 8555] MUST NOT be present in a STAR Order. If they are
included, the server MUST return an error with status code 400 (Bad
Request) and type "malformedRequest".
Section 7.1.6 of [RFC 8555] defines the following values for the Order
resource's status: "pending", "ready", "processing", "valid", and
"invalid". In the case of auto-renewal Orders, the status MUST be
"valid" as long as STAR certificates are being issued. This document
adds a new status value: "canceled" (see Section 3.1.2).
A STAR certificate is by definition a dynamic resource, i.e., it
refers to an entity that varies over time. Instead of overloading
the semantics of the "certificate" attribute, this document defines a
new attribute, "star-certificate", to be used instead of
"certificate".
* star-certificate (optional, string): A URL for the (rolling) STAR
certificate that has been issued in response to this Order.
3.1.2. Canceling an Auto-renewal Order
An important property of the auto-renewal Order is that it can be
canceled by the IdO with no need for certificate revocation. To
cancel the Order, the ACME client sends a POST to the Order URL as
shown in Figure 3.
POST /acme/order/ogfr8EcolOT HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
Content-Type: application/jose+json
{
"protected": base64url({
"alg": "ES256",
"kid": "https://example.com/acme/acct/gw06UNhKfOve",
"nonce": "Alc00Ap6Rt7GMkEl3L1JX5",
"url": "https://example.com/acme/order/ogfr8EcolOT"
}),
"payload": base64url({
"status": "canceled"
}),
"signature": "g454e3hdBlkT4AEw...nKePnUyZTjGtXZ6H"
}
Figure 3: Canceling an Auto-renewal Order
After a successful cancellation, the server MUST NOT issue any
additional certificates for this Order.
When the Order is canceled, the server:
* MUST update the status of the Order resource to "canceled" and
MUST set an appropriate "expires" date;
* MUST respond with 403 (Forbidden) to any requests to the star-
certificate endpoint. The response SHOULD provide additional
information using a problem document [RFC 7807] with type
"urn:ietf:params:acme:error:autoRenewalCanceled".
Issuing a cancellation for an Order that is not in "valid" state is
not allowed. A client MUST NOT send such a request, and a server
MUST return an error response with status code 400 (Bad Request) and
type "urn:ietf:params:acme:error:autoRenewalCancellationInvalid".
The state machine described in Section 7.1.6 of [RFC 8555] is extended
as illustrated in Figure 4.
pending --------------+
| |
| All authz |
| "valid" |
V |
ready ---------------+
| |
| Receive |
| finalize |
| request |
V |
processing ------------+
| |
| First |
| certificate | Error or
| issued | Authorization failure
| |
| V
| invalid
V
valid----------------+
| |
| STAR |
| Certificate | Natural
| canceled | Expiration
V |
canceled ='=
Figure 4: State Transitions for STAR Order Objects
Explicit certificate revocation using the revokeCert interface
(Section 7.6 of [RFC 8555]) is not supported for STAR certificates. A
server receiving a revocation request for a STAR certificate MUST
return an error response with status code 403 (Forbidden) and type
"urn:ietf:params:acme:error:autoRenewalRevocationNotSupported".
3.2. Capability Discovery
In order to support the discovery of STAR capabilities, the "meta"
field inside the directory object defined in Section 9.7.6 of
[RFC 8555] is extended with a new "auto-renewal" object. The "auto-
renewal" object MUST be present if the server supports STAR. Its
structure is as follows:
* min-lifetime (required, integer): Minimum acceptable value for
auto-renewal lifetime, in seconds.
* max-duration (required, integer): Maximum allowed delta between
the end-date and start-date attributes of the Order's auto-renewal
object.
* allow-certificate-get (optional, boolean): See Section 3.4.
An example directory object advertising STAR support with one-day
min-lifetime and one-year max-duration and supporting certificate
fetching with an HTTP GET is shown in Figure 5.
{
"new-nonce": "https://example.com/acme/new-nonce",
"new-account": "https://example.com/acme/new-account",
"new-order": "https://example.com/acme/new-order",
"new-authz": "https://example.com/acme/new-authz",
"revoke-cert": "https://example.com/acme/revoke-cert",
"key-change": "https://example.com/acme/key-change",
"meta": {
"terms-of-service": "https://example.com/acme/terms/2017-5-30",
"website": "https://www.example.com/",
"caa-identities": ["example.com"],
"auto-renewal": {
"min-lifetime": 86400,
"max-duration": 31536000,
"allow-certificate-get": true
}
}
}
Figure 5: Directory Object with STAR Support
3.3. Fetching the Certificates
The certificate is fetched from the star-certificate endpoint with
POST-as-GET as per Section 7.4.2 of [RFC 8555] unless the client and
server have successfully negotiated the "unauthenticated GET" option
described in Section 3.4. In such case, the client can simply issue
a GET to the star-certificate resource without authenticating itself
to the server as illustrated in Figure 6.
GET /acme/cert/g7m3ZQeTEqa HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
Accept: application/pem-certificate-chain
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/pem-certificate-chain
Link: <https://example.com/acme/some-directory>;rel="index"
Cert-Not-Before: Thu, 3 Oct 2019 00:00:00 GMT
Cert-Not-After: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 00:00:00 GMT
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
[End-entity certificate contents]
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
[Issuer certificate contents]
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
[Other certificate contents]
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
Figure 6: Fetching a STAR Certificate with Unauthenticated GET
The server SHOULD include the "Cert-Not-Before" and "Cert-Not-After"
HTTP header fields in the response. When they exist, they MUST be
equal to the respective fields inside the end-entity certificate.
Their format is "HTTP-date" as defined in Section 7.1.1.2 of
[RFC 7231]. Their purpose is to enable client implementations that do
not parse the certificate.
The following are further clarifications regarding usage of these
header fields as per Section 8.3.1 of [RFC 7231]. All apply to both
headers.
* This header field is a single value, not a list.
* The header field is used only in responses to GET, HEAD, and POST-
as-GET requests, and only for MIME types that denote public key
certificates.
* Header field semantics are independent of context.
* The header field is not hop-by-hop.
* Intermediaries MAY insert or delete the value;
* If an intermediary inserts the value, it MUST ensure that the
newly added value matches the corresponding value in the
certificate.
* The header field is not appropriate for a Vary field.
* The header field is allowed within message trailers.
* The header field is not appropriate within redirects.
* The header field does not introduce additional security
considerations. It discloses in a simpler form information that
is already available inside the certificate.
To improve robustness, the next certificate MUST be made available by
the ACME CA at the URL indicated by "star-certificate" halfway
through the lifetime of the currently active certificate at the
latest. It is worth noting that this has an implication in case of
cancellation; in fact, from the time the next certificate is made
available, the cancellation is not completely effective until the
"next" certificate also expires. To avoid the client accidentally
entering a broken state, the notBefore of the "next" certificate MUST
be set so that the certificate is already valid when it is published
at the "star-certificate" URL. Note that the server might need to
increase the auto-renewal lifetime-adjust value to satisfy the latter
requirement. For a detailed description of the renewal scheduling
logic, see Section 3.5. For further rationale on the need for
adjusting the certificate validity, see Section 4.1.
The server MUST NOT issue any certificates for this Order with
notAfter after the auto-renewal end-date.
For expired Orders, the server MUST respond with 403 (Forbidden) to
any requests to the star-certificate endpoint. The response SHOULD
provide additional information using a problem document [RFC 7807]
with type "urn:ietf:params:acme:error:autoRenewalExpired". Note that
the Order resource's state remains "valid", as per the base protocol.
3.4. Negotiating an Unauthenticated GET
In order to enable the name delegation workflow defined in
[STAR-DELEGATION] and to increase the reliability of the STAR
ecosystem (see Section 4.3 for details), this document defines a
mechanism that allows a server to advertise support for accessing
star-certificate resources via unauthenticated GET (in addition to
POST-as-GET), and a client to enable this service with per-Order
granularity.
Specifically, a server states its availability to grant
unauthenticated access to a client's Order star-certificate by
setting the allow-certificate-get attribute to "true" in the auto-
renewal object of the meta field inside the directory object:
* allow-certificate-get (optional, boolean): If this field is
present and set to "true", the server allows GET (and HEAD)
requests to star-certificate URLs.
A client states its desire to access the issued star-certificate via
unauthenticated GET by adding an allow-certificate-get attribute to
the auto-renewal object of the payload of its newOrder request and
setting it to "true".
* allow-certificate-get (optional, boolean): If this field is
present and set to "true", the client requests the server to allow
unauthenticated GET (and HEAD) to the star-certificate associated
with this Order.
If the server accepts the request, it MUST reflect the attribute
setting in the resulting order object.
Note that even when the use of unauthenticated GET has been agreed
upon, the server MUST also allow POST-as-GET requests to the star-
certificate resource.
3.5. Computing notBefore and notAfter of STAR Certificates
We define "nominal renewal date" as the point in time when a new
short-term certificate for a given STAR Order is due. Its cadence is
a multiple of the Order's auto-renewal lifetime that starts with the
issuance of the first short-term certificate and is upper-bounded by
the Order's auto-renewal end-date (Figure 7).
T - STAR Order's auto-renewal lifetime
end - STAR Order's auto-renewal end-date
nrd[i] - nominal renewal date of the i-th STAR certificate
.- T -. .- T -. .- T -. .__.
/ \ / \ / \ / end
-----------o---------o---------o---------o----X-------> t
nrd[0] nrd[1] nrd[2] nrd[3]
Figure 7: Nominal Renewal Date
The rules to determine the notBefore and notAfter values of the i-th
STAR certificate are as follows:
notAfter = min(nrd[i] + T, end)
notBefore = nrd[i] - max(adjust_client, adjust_server)
Where "adjust_client" is the minimum value between the auto-renewal
lifetime-adjust value ("la"), optionally supplied by the client, and
the auto-renewal lifetime of each short-term certificate ("T");
"adjust_server" is the amount of padding added by the ACME server to
make sure that all certificates being published are valid at the time
of publication. The server padding is a fraction (f) of T (i.e., f *
T with .5 <= f < 1; see Section 3.3):
adjust_client = min(T, la)
adjust_server = f * T
Note that the ACME server MUST NOT set the notBefore of the first
STAR certificate to a date prior to the auto-renewal start-date.
3.5.1. Example
Given a server that intends to publish the next STAR certificate
halfway through the lifetime of the previous one, and a STAR Order
with the following attributes:
"auto-renewal": {
"start-date": "2019-01-10T00:00:00Z",
"end-date": "2019-01-20T00:00:00Z",
"lifetime": 345600, // 4 days
"lifetime-adjust": 259200 // 3 days
}
The amount of time that needs to be subtracted from each nominal
renewal date is 3 days, i.e., max(min(345600, 259200), 345600 * .5).
The notBefore and notAfter of each short-term certificate are:
+----------------------+----------------------+
| notBefore | notAfter |
+======================+======================+
| 2019-01-10T00:00:00Z | 2019-01-14T00:00:00Z |
+----------------------+----------------------+
| 2019-01-11T00:00:00Z | 2019-01-18T00:00:00Z |
+----------------------+----------------------+
| 2019-01-15T00:00:00Z | 2019-01-20T00:00:00Z |
+----------------------+----------------------+
Table 1
The value of the notBefore is also the time at which the client
should expect the new certificate to be available from the star-
certificate endpoint.
4. Operational Considerations
4.1. The Meaning of "Short Term" and the Impact of Skewed Clocks
"Short Term" is a relative concept; therefore, trying to define a
cutoff point that works in all cases would be a useless exercise. In
practice, the expected lifetime of a STAR certificate will be counted
in minutes, hours, or days, depending on different factors: the
underlying requirements for revocation, how much clock
synchronization is expected among relying parties and the issuing CA,
etc.
Nevertheless, this section attempts to provide reasonable suggestions
for the Web use case, informed by current operational and research
experience.
Acer et al. [ACER] find that one of the main causes of "HTTPS error"
warnings in browsers is misconfigured client clocks. In particular,
they observe that roughly 95% of the "severe" clock skews -- the 6.7%
of clock-related breakage reports that account for clients that are
more than 24 hours behind -- happen to be within 6-7 days.
In order to avoid these spurious warnings about a not yet valid
server certificate, site owners could use the auto-renewal lifetime-
adjust attribute to control the effective lifetime of their Web-
facing certificates. The exact number depends on the percentage of
the "clock-skewed" population that the site owner expects to protect
-- 5 days cover 97.3%, 7 days cover 99.6% -- as well as the nominal
auto-renewal lifetime of the STAR Order. Note that exact choice is
also likely to depend on the kinds of client that are prevalent for a
given site or app -- for example, Android and Mac OS clients are
known to behave better than Windows clients. These considerations
are clearly out of scope of this document.
In terms of security, STAR certificates and certificates with the
Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) "must-staple" flag asserted
[RFC 7633] can be considered roughly equivalent if the STAR
certificate's and the OCSP response's lifetimes are the same. (Here,
"must-staple" refers to a certificate carrying a TLS feature
extension with the "status_request" extension identifier [RFC 6066].)
Given OCSP responses can be cached, on average, for 4 days [STARK],
it is RECOMMENDED that a STAR certificate that is used on the Web has
an "effective" lifetime (excluding any adjustment to account for
clock skews) no longer than 4 days.
4.2. Impact on Certificate Transparency (CT) Logs
Even in the highly unlikely case STAR becomes the only certificate
issuance model, discussion with the IETF TRANS Working Group and
implementers of Certificate Transparency (CT) logs suggests that
existing CT Log server implementations are capable of sustaining the
resulting 100-fold increase in ingestion rate. Additionally, such a
future higher load could be managed with a variety of techniques
(e.g., sharding by modulo of certificate hash, using "smart" load-
balancing CT proxies, etc.). With regards to the increase in the log
size, current CT log growth is already being managed with schemes
like Chrome's Log Policy [OBRIEN], which allow Operators to define
their log life cycle, as well as allowing the CAs, User Agents,
Monitors, and any other interested entities to build in support for
that life cycle ahead of time.
4.3. HTTP Caching and Dependability
When using authenticated POST-as-GET, the HTTPS endpoint from where
the STAR certificate is fetched can't be easily replicated by an on-
path HTTP cache. Reducing the caching properties of the protocol
makes STAR clients increasingly dependent on the ACME server
availability. This might be problematic given the relatively high
rate of client-server interactions in a STAR ecosystem, especially
when multiple endpoints (e.g., a high number of CDN edge nodes) end
up requesting the same certificate. Clients and servers should
consider using the mechanism described in Section 3.4 to mitigate the
risk.
When using unauthenticated GET to fetch the STAR certificate, the
server SHALL use the appropriate cache directives to set the
freshness lifetime of the response (Section 5.2 of [RFC 7234]) such
that on-path caches will consider it stale before or at the time its
effective lifetime is due to expire.
5. IANA Considerations
5.1. New Registries
Per this document, IANA has created the following new registries:
* ACME Order Auto-Renewal Fields (Section 5.4)
* ACME Directory Metadata Auto-Renewal Fields (Section 5.6)
These registries are administered under a Specification Required
policy [RFC 8126].
5.2. New Error Types
Per this document, IANA has added the following entries to the "ACME
Error Types" registry:
+-----------------------------------+-------------------+-----------+
| Type | Description | Reference |
+===================================+===================+===========+
| autoRenewalCanceled | The short-term | RFC 8739 |
| | certificate is | |
| | no longer | |
| | available | |
| | because the | |
| | auto-renewal | |
| | Order has been | |
| | explicitly | |
| | canceled by | |
| | the IdO | |
+-----------------------------------+-------------------+-----------+
| autoRenewalExpired | The short-term | RFC 8739 |
| | certificate is | |
| | no longer | |
| | available | |
| | because the | |
| | auto-renewal | |
| | Order has | |
| | expired | |
+-----------------------------------+-------------------+-----------+
| autoRenewalCancellationInvalid | A request to | RFC 8739 |
| | cancel an | |
| | auto-renewal | |
| | Order that is | |
| | not in state | |
| | "valid" has | |
| | been received | |
+-----------------------------------+-------------------+-----------+
| autoRenewalRevocationNotSupported | A request to | RFC 8739 |
| | revoke an | |
| | auto-renewal | |
| | Order has been | |
| | received | |
+-----------------------------------+-------------------+-----------+
Table 2
5.3. New Fields in Order Objects
Per this document, IANA has added the following entries to the "ACME
Order Object Fields" registry:
+------------------+------------+--------------+-----------+
| Field Name | Field Type | Configurable | Reference |
+==================+============+==============+===========+
| auto-renewal | object | true | RFC 8739 |
+------------------+------------+--------------+-----------+
| star-certificate | string | false | RFC 8739 |
+------------------+------------+--------------+-----------+
Table 3
5.4. Fields in the "auto-renewal" Object within an Order Object
The "ACME Order Auto-Renewal Fields" registry lists field names that
are defined for use in the JSON object included in the "auto-renewal"
field of an ACME order object.
Template:
* Field name: The string to be used as a field name in the JSON
object
* Field type: The type of value to be provided, e.g., string,
boolean, array of string
* Configurable: Boolean indicating whether the server should accept
values provided by the client
* Reference: Where this field is defined
Initial contents: The fields and descriptions defined in
Section 3.1.1.
+-----------------------+------------+--------------+-----------+
| Field Name | Field Type | Configurable | Reference |
+=======================+============+==============+===========+
| start-date | string | true | RFC 8739 |
+-----------------------+------------+--------------+-----------+
| end-date | string | true | RFC 8739 |
+-----------------------+------------+--------------+-----------+
| lifetime | integer | true | RFC 8739 |
+-----------------------+------------+--------------+-----------+
| lifetime-adjust | integer | true | RFC 8739 |
+-----------------------+------------+--------------+-----------+
| allow-certificate-get | boolean | true | RFC 8739 |
+-----------------------+------------+--------------+-----------+
Table 4
5.5. New Fields in the "meta" Object within a Directory Object
Per this document, IANA has added the following entry to the "ACME
Directory Metadata Fields":
+--------------+------------+-----------+
| Field Name | Field Type | Reference |
+==============+============+===========+
| auto-renewal | object | RFC 8739 |
+--------------+------------+-----------+
Table 5
5.6. Fields in the "auto-renewal" Object within a Directory Metadata
Object
The "ACME Directory Metadata Auto-Renewal Fields" registry lists
field names that are defined for use in the JSON object included in
the "auto-renewal" field of an ACME directory "meta" object.
Template:
* Field name: The string to be used as a field name in the JSON
object
* Field type: The type of value to be provided, e.g., string,
boolean, array of string
* Reference: Where this field is defined
Initial contents: The fields and descriptions defined in Section 3.2.
+-----------------------+------------+-----------+
| Field Name | Field Type | Reference |
+=======================+============+===========+
| min-lifetime | integer | RFC 8739 |
+-----------------------+------------+-----------+
| max-duration | integer | RFC 8739 |
+-----------------------+------------+-----------+
| allow-certificate-get | boolean | RFC 8739 |
+-----------------------+------------+-----------+
Table 6
5.7. Cert-Not-Before and Cert-Not-After HTTP Headers
The "Message Headers" registry has been updated with the following
additional values:
+-------------------+----------+----------+-----------------------+
| Header Field Name | Protocol | Status | Reference |
+===================+==========+==========+=======================+
| Cert-Not-Before | http | standard | RFC 8739, Section 3.3 |
+-------------------+----------+----------+-----------------------+
| Cert-Not-After | http | standard | RFC 8739, Section 3.3 |
+-------------------+----------+----------+-----------------------+
Table 7
6. Security Considerations
6.1. No Revocation
STAR certificates eliminate an important security feature of PKI,
which is the ability to revoke certificates. Revocation allows the
administrator to limit the damage done by a rogue node or an
adversary who has control of the private key. With STAR
certificates, expiration replaces revocation so there is potential
for lack of timeliness in the revocation taking effect. To that end,
see also the discussion on clock skew in Section 4.1.
It should be noted that revocation also has timeliness issues because
both Certificate Revocation Lists (CRLs) and OCSP responses have
nextUpdate fields that tell relying parties (RPs) how long they
should trust this revocation data. These fields are typically set to
hours, days, or even weeks in the future. Any revocation that
happens before the time in nextUpdate goes unnoticed by the RP.
One situation where the lack of explicit revocation could create a
security risk to the IdO is when the Order is created with a start-
date of some appreciable amount of time in the future. Recall that
when authorizations have been fulfilled, the Order moves to the
"valid" state and the star-certificate endpoint is populated with the
first cert (Figure 4). So, if an attacker manages to get hold of the
private key as well as the first (post-dated) certificate, there is a
time window in the future when they will be able to successfully
impersonate the IdO. Note that cancellation is pointless in this
case. In order to mitigate the described threat, it is RECOMMENDED
that IdO place their Orders at a time that is close to the Order's
start-date.
More discussion of the security of STAR certificates is available in
[TOPALOVIC].
6.2. Denial-of-Service Considerations
STAR adds a new attack vector that increases the threat of denial-of-
service attacks, caused by the change to the CA's behavior. Each
STAR request amplifies the resource demands upon the CA, where one
Order produces not one but potentially dozens or hundreds of
certificates, depending on the auto-renewal "lifetime" parameter. An
attacker can use this property to aggressively reduce the auto-
renewal "lifetime" (e.g., 1 second) jointly with other ACME attack
vectors identified in Section 10 of [RFC 8555]. Other collateral
impact is related to the certificate endpoint resource where the
client can retrieve the certificates periodically. If this resource
is external to the CA (e.g., a hosted web server), the previous
attack will be reflected to that resource.
Mitigation recommendations from ACME still apply, but some of them
need to be adjusted. For example, applying rate limiting to the
initial request, due to the nature of the auto-renewal behavior,
cannot solve the above problem. The CA server needs complementary
mitigation, and specifically, it SHOULD enforce a minimum value on
auto-renewal "lifetime". Alternatively, the CA can set a rate limit
for internal certificate generation processes. Note that this limit
has to take account of already scheduled renewal issuances as well as
new incoming requests.
6.3. Privacy Considerations
In order to avoid correlation of certificates by account, if
unauthenticated GET is negotiated (Section 3.4), the recommendation
in Section 10.5 of [RFC 8555] regarding the choice of URL structure
applies, i.e., servers SHOULD choose URLs of certificate resources in
a non-guessable way, for example, using capability URLs
[W3C.CAPABILITY-URLS].
7. References
7.1. Normative References
[RFC 2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
DOI 10.17487/RFC 2119, March 1997,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/RFC 2119>.
[RFC 3339] Klyne, G. and C. Newman, "Date and Time on the Internet:
Timestamps", RFC 3339, DOI 10.17487/RFC 3339, July 2002,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/RFC 3339>.
[RFC 7231] Fielding, R., Ed. and J. Reschke, Ed., "Hypertext Transfer
Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Semantics and Content", RFC 7231,
DOI 10.17487/RFC 7231, June 2014,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/RFC 7231>.
[RFC 7234] Fielding, R., Ed., Nottingham, M., Ed., and J. Reschke,
Ed., "Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Caching",
RFC 7234, DOI 10.17487/RFC 7234, June 2014,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/RFC 7234>.
[RFC 7807] Nottingham, M. and E. Wilde, "Problem Details for HTTP
APIs", RFC 7807, DOI 10.17487/RFC 7807, March 2016,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/RFC 7807>.
[RFC 8126] Cotton, M., Leiba, B., and T. Narten, "Guidelines for
Writing an IANA Considerations Section in RFCs", BCP 26,
RFC 8126, DOI 10.17487/RFC 8126, June 2017,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/RFC 8126>.
[RFC 8174] Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC
2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC 8174,
May 2017, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/RFC 8174>.
[RFC 8555] Barnes, R., Hoffman-Andrews, J., McCarney, D., and J.
Kasten, "Automatic Certificate Management Environment
(ACME)", RFC 8555, DOI 10.17487/RFC 8555, March 2019,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/RFC 8555>.
7.2. Informative References
[ACER] Acer, M.E., Stark, E., Felt, A.P., Fahl, S., Bhargava, R.,
Dev, B., Braithwaite, M., Sleevi, R., and P. Tabriz,
"Where the Wild Warnings Are: Root Causes of Chrome HTTPS
Certificate Errors", DOI 10.1145/3133956.3134007, October
2017, <https://acmccs.github.io/papers/p1407-acerA.pdf>.
[OBRIEN] O'Brien, D. and R. Sleevi, "Chromium Certificate
Transparency Policy", April 2017,
<https://github.com/chromium/ct-policy>.
[RFC 6066] Eastlake 3rd, D., "Transport Layer Security (TLS)
Extensions: Extension Definitions", RFC 6066,
DOI 10.17487/RFC 6066, January 2011,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/RFC 6066>.
[RFC 7633] Hallam-Baker, P., "X.509v3 Transport Layer Security (TLS)
Feature Extension", RFC 7633, DOI 10.17487/RFC 7633,
October 2015, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/RFC 7633>.
[SHORT-TERM-CERTS]
Nir, Y., Fossati, T., Sheffer, Y., and T. Eckert,
"Considerations For Using Short Term Certificates", Work
in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-nir-saag-star-01, 5
March 2018,
<https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-nir-saag-star-01>.
[STAR-DELEGATION]
Sheffer, Y., Lopez, D., Pastor, A., and T. Fossati, "An
ACME Profile for Generating Delegated STAR Certificates",
Work in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-ietf-acme-star-
delegation-03, 8 March 2020, <https://tools.ietf.org/html/
draft-ietf-acme-star-delegation-03>.
[STARK] Stark, E., Huang, L.S., Israni, D., Jackson, C., and D.
Boneh, "The case for prefetching and prevalidating TLS
server certificates", February 2012,
<https://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/pubs/abstracts/ssl-
prefetch.html>.
[TOPALOVIC]
Topalovic, E., Saeta, B., Huang, L.S., Jackson, C., and D.
Boneh, "Towards Short-Lived Certificates", 2012,
<https://www.ieee-security.org/TC/W2SP/2012/papers/
w2sp12-final9.pdf>.
[W3C.CAPABILITY-URLS]
Tennison, J., "Good Practices for Capability URLs", W3C
First Public Working Draft, Latest version available at
<https://www.w3.org/TR/capability-urls/>, February 2014,
<https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-capability-urls-20140218>.
Acknowledgments
This work is partially supported by the European Commission under
Horizon 2020 grant agreement no. 688421 Measurement and Architecture
for a Middleboxed Internet (MAMI). This support does not imply
endorsement.
Thanks to Ben Kaduk, Richard Barnes, Roman Danyliw, Jon Peterson,
Eric Rescorla, Ryan Sleevi, Sean Turner, Alexey Melnikov, Adam Roach,
Martin Thomson, and Mehmet Ersue for helpful comments and discussions
that have shaped this document.
Authors' Addresses
Yaron Sheffer
Intuit
Email: yaronf.ietf@gmail.com
Diego Lopez
Telefonica I+D
Email: diego.r.lopez@telefonica.com
Oscar Gonzalez de Dios
Telefonica I+D
Email: oscar.gonzalezdedios@telefonica.com
Antonio Agustin Pastor Perales
Telefonica I+D
Email: antonio.pastorperales@telefonica.com
Thomas Fossati
ARM
Email: thomas.fossati@arm.com
RFC TOTAL SIZE: 50180 bytes
PUBLICATION DATE: Wednesday, March 11th, 2020
LEGAL RIGHTS: The IETF Trust (see BCP 78)
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